Last week I shared an article by Dr. Frank Furendi about the Christian origins of liberty in Western history and then drew out some of the important insights understanding this history gives us into the nature of what liberty is and how it functions. In that same article I also touched on the myth that liberty as an ideal is a product of Western history and Western beliefs. But I never really addressed why liberty is so important. And people have numerous questions about it.
Why does liberty matter to us today? Why wouldn’t we want those in power to “fix” the world for everyone even if it means trading our freedom in for subservience to the social and political agenda of those in power? What is liberty to begin with? How do I even know if I am losing it or not? By the end of this article, I will have done three things to help answer these questions.
First, I will have expanded on what the nature of liberty is in greater detail, so we know exactly what we are talking about. Secondly, I will then provide an analysis of why liberty is so unpopular in our modern age. Finally, I will offer an argument for why liberty should be more popular and why it should be embraced by all people as absolutely necessary to a prosperous and successful society.
The Nature of Liberty
As Dr. Furendi explained, the origins of liberty in the West can be traced back to the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther’s challenge to the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church didn’t undermine the hegemony of the Catholic Church but Luther’s arguments also laid the foundation for the rejection of political authority as well. If the Pope isn’t any better than me, if he has no greater access to God than I do, then why should I care about what the king thinks? Kings and queens don’t even have a moral authority as high as the Pope’s and all their political authority derives from papal authority as it was the Pope who crowned them kings and the Church which blessed their nations. If I don’t need the Pope to tell me how to live then why on Earth would I need a king to tell me what to think or how to live? Dr. Christopher Hill explained the challenge of Protestantism to the religious and political system of Europe thusly:
The essence of protestantism – the priesthood of all believers – was logically a doctrine of individualist anarchy. “Here I stand, so help me God, I can do not other;” in that cry Luther rejected the authority of the Pope, church and secular power.
…Yet the protestant emphasis on conscience, the inner light, leads logically on to anarchism. Once a constraining authority exists, be it state or bishops or presbytery, it is bound at some stage or other to come up against dissenting consciences.
….The Marquis of Newcastle was not absurdly exaggerating when he warned the young Charles II [the Second] that “if any be Bible-men… they may think it a service to God to destroy you and say the spirit moved them.”
There is thus a tension between any state church and protestant individual consciences. Some consciences some time are likely to feel called upon to obey the God within them rather than the state or its church.
The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, Vol. 2, pgs. 38-40
Liberty then developed as a rejection of the power of those who claimed to rule and as a declaration that humans have a right to live according to the dictates of their individual consciences. The government did not have the right to direct and command the lives of men, telling them where they could go, what they could do, and how they could live. It did not have the authority to seize the product of their labor, whether that be crops, commodities, or coins. It could not order them to violate the beliefs that they held most sacred or make them servants to it. It has always been a doctrine of the individual – “Here I stand” – arrayed against the power of the collective as it tries to compel people to obey it. Liberty has always been a threat to those in power as liberty teaches people to reject the justifications of politicians and those in positions of power, to instead live according to the unalterable facts of morality and truth. And if that degrades or destroys the power of the government, so be it. Any system that can only exist through violence and compulsion has no right to exist any way.
Thus, when we talk about liberty it is very clear what liberty is – it is freedom from collective control in order to live how you believe you should live. Liberty is freedom from those in political power being able to use the law to regulate what you think, what you say, where you live, how you live, what you eat, what you drink, what you smoke, what you put into your body, what you believe, how you live out your beliefs, what kind of job you have, how much you must get paid, how long you can or cannot work, ad infinitum, worlds without end.
Liberty does not mean that you do not face hardship, trials, and denials. It does not mean your life is easy, everyone loves you, and no one offends you. Liberty means you are free from having to live according to the moral, social, and ideological beliefs of others being forced upon you through the law. The motivation for those beliefs (religious, racial, economic, etc.) are irrelevant. Just as liberty means freedom from having to be a Catholic it also means freedom from having to be a supporter of whatever the current social movement or cause is popular.
Liberty is the ability to live according to your own beliefs free from government control ordering you to do otherwise.
Why Is Liberty Unpopular?
The true nature of liberty is of course very unpopular today. This is because liberty is not an ideal for a society that believes the state can create a Utopia by ensuring that all of the needs people have are taken care of, that they are free from want or fear. Indeed, liberty cannot exist in such a society where those in positions of political authority exercise all the power over society necessary to even pretend to ensure that all people are free from all their wants or needs and are perfectly safe. And be assured that all they would ever do is pretend as it is actually impossible for a government to provide for all the wants of needs of all people no matter how much power the state has, only a god could do such a thing. But imagine that it could. Imagine a place where your every want is satisfied, fear has been annihilated, and sorrow has been abolished and all it cost was individual liberty. Would you wish to live in that world?
That is the very topic of the classic novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In it a “Savage” living on a reservation is brought into modern society where he finds that through a combination of indoctrination, copious drug use (the universal drug being soma), and technocratic rule all of the troubles that humans face today have been eliminated. The urge for anything – sex, food, luxuries – is satisfiable almost immediately. The physical standard of living is greater than at any time in history and most people spend their time in a haze of bliss. The people have no liberty, but they also have no want or need. This, the Savage sees, rots their soul, but they do not care. They have been pacified and lulled into subservience by carnal security, or at least the illusion of such.
In the following excerpt the Savage is talking with one of the technocrats by the name of Mustapha Mond, who has told him that books like Shakespeare and the Bible are prohibited because they’re old and have ideas in them that those in power do not want the people thinking about. Ideas such as self-denial, discipline, joy, sorrow, hope, and love are all irrelevant in the modern age of excess and plenty. They discuss the nature of liberty without ever saying the word and we pick up with Mond explaining how modern society can physically simulate the body’s need for physical exertion and danger without any of the inconveniences of having to face actual danger. I pick up with the Savage’s response here:
“But I like the inconveniences.”
Brave New World, pgs. 267-268. I highly suggest reading all of chapters 16 and 17 though.
“We don’t,” said the Controller [Mond]. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome,” he said
Liberty is not the promise of utopia. It does not promise us security, only endless possibility. Indeed, the kind of utopia that those who seek to redefine liberty as meaning freedom from want and fear envision may not be the kind of place any of us would want to live at all. It seems easier to believe in utopia – in a perfect society just around the corner where all war, racism, sexism, genderism, poverty, class, and inequalities of any sort will completely cease as the government sagaciously applies its power to regulate and control human existence, ensuring everyone thinks, does, and has the right amount of everything.
This kind of world requires nothing from us except submission. And that seems like such a small cost. Note, I said seems, as the reality is far worse. To quote someone rather famous, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” This is the meat of the entire conversation between Mond and the Savage. Mond lives in a society where the liberty of the soul has been traded for every kind of ease and convivence. The Savage recognizes that they do have everything but in obtaining a life of ease they have traded away everything that mattered.
The Value of Liberty
Liberty challenges the soul. It forces us to not just make the world a better place but to make ourselves better individuals. Yes, you can most likely achieve some kind of stable welfare society by indoctrinating the masses on the one hand and drugging them into oblivion on the other – and modern society does both very well – but that misses the point of existence. Humans do not exist simply to live as easy a life as possible and then die. We are meant to struggle against ourselves, to develop beauty and art and meaning. To improve. And a society where we are all dependent on the government and submissive to its imperatives cannot do that.
It is only when we have the liberty to challenge our assumptions and question society that we purify the dross, refine our gold, and know what is beautiful and true which we can clasp to our bosoms forever. It is only in liberty that we produce the things that don’t just make life easily livable but by which we make life worth living. Only in liberty do we find our humanity and thereby increase our selves, our souls. Yes, there are tears and there is cost. But it is in paying those very costs and crying those very tears that we find the passion, the meaning, the purpose, and the enlightenment to create all the great works of art and to think all the great thoughts of history – it is there we find our worth and our humanity, our community and our love.
Without liberty the soul withers and atrophies, reducing and degrading the individual into nothing but a number and a social cog. The Savage realizes that Mond’s civilization hasn’t truly done away with the hardships of life, it has merely escaped having to recognize those trials and thereby made itself dead to the possibility, depths, and progress those trials drive humanity to achieving. Instead they drug themselves into stagnation, slavery, and solace:
[Mond said:] And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that’s what soma is.”
“But the tears are necessary. Don’t you remember what Othello said? ‘If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.’ … “What you need,” the Savage went on, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”
Brave New World, pgs. 265-266
Liberty also gives us one more great ability: Liberty allows us to solve the problems of the world. Mond’s world wasn’t perfect. It merely had perfected the image of perfection and patched all the holes with hedonism. In a free society people would be able to develop the ideas to recognize the ennui that had infected their society and call upon the great (but then forbidden) philosophies, religions, and ideas of history to combat that listlessness with meaning and purpose, with power and possibility. But Mond’s world was not a free world. And therefore it was a stagnate one, slowly rotting away like a pool of filth sitting in the sun at noonday. The same is true today.
No matter how many times and how many ways people try to solve problems of racism, nationalism, sexism, poverty, etc. with the application of state power by making some new law or laws they will never succeed in making the world better, they will never be able to correct the problems they are trying to fix. This is because these problems are not monolithic evils. The problems of the world arise from causes and beliefs as varied as humanity is and you cannot eliminate them. It is the nature of humanity that our solutions to one problem create the problems of another, which is why the tears are so important. It is in paying the price that we learn what is truly valuable and develop the skills to face the next unseen and heretofore unknown trials.
Summary
It is only through liberty from government power and regulatory edicts that we are able to confront the true problems of our society, an act which is itself often highly controversial and therefore opposed by society and state, and either develop or find from history the metaphorical and literal tools needed to make the world a better place. Whereas the statists and central planners envision some kind of perfect society they want to achieve and then calcify all of humanity within, liberty is the engine that develops the solution(s) to our problems, often before we even realize what those problems are. This is because people in a very society are always responding the each others wants and needs, providing a multitude of answers to the wants and needs of those around them to mutual benefit and profit. Liberty incentivizes recognizing the needs of others and seeking to solve those needs because you can’t just demand others obey you and you can’t just demand they give you their money. Thus, while a free society is a self-consciously imperfect one it is one that is nevertheless attempting to better itself while unfree societies are always seeing any deviation from the accepted norms as a threat to the ideological regime in power, thus grinding true human progress to a halt.